


Operation Twin Magic

by APgeeksout



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Bodyswap, Dubious Consent, Hair Washing, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-11 00:22:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5606599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/APgeeksout/pseuds/APgeeksout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agent of The Authority Seth Rollins always does what's best for the mission.  Even when that means trading places with Dean Ambrose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Operation Twin Magic

**Author's Note:**

> For the "Bodyswap" square in Round 6 of [Hurt/Comfort Bingo](http://hc_bingo.livejournal.com) and the [Superspy Shenanigans](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/SuperspyAU/profile) collection, where everyone should come play!

“It'll only be for 48 hours. Get in, find out what they know, and get out.” Steph said, counting out three simple steps on her immaculately-manicured fingers. “You know it has to be you, Seth. No one else knows that lunatic well enough to fool Reigns.”

“The procedure's safe, Boss,” Jamie offered. “Went like clockwork when they tested it out on Joey and me last week.”

“And we'll stay with you – him – well, you know what I mean – the whole time you're gone,” Joey chimed in, resting a hand in the middle of Seth's back. “Be good to be your bodyguards again.”

“We believe in you, Seth,” Hunter said, hands settling gentle but heavy on either side of his neck. “Show me again why you're our best investment.”

He shifted, peering through the security glass of the observation window behind Hunter; in the lab, Ambrose, finally securely straitjacketed, thrashed against the leather and canvas straps that held him down to one of the procedure chairs. His face was twisted with rage and the promise of violence, and even though the room's construction dampened the sound of his steady stream of invective, Seth could hear every word. _You'll pay for it all, you son-of-a-bitch_ echoed through him as he nodded his acquiescence. “I'm the man.”

 

“It's only to keep him from hurting you once it's done, Boss,” Jamie assured, taking another notch of slack out of the thick strap banded across his chest.

“Can't have him scuffing up the merchandise,” Seth said, hearing the bitterness in his tone even over Ambrose's muffled curses and pleas.

“No, sir,” Jamie agreed amiably, missing or ignoring Seth's bile. He stroked the fingers of one hand over Seth's cheek while the other pressed the thick rubber mouthguard past his lips.

 

No wonder Dean was so damned twitchy all the time. Everything itched: the fabric of Dean's clothes, so much coarser than Seth had grown accustomed to; the sweat Dean had worked up railing against Seth's team dried now in his hair and on his skin, leaving Seth feeling grimy but looking the part of a madman who'd pulled out a daring escape against all odds and good common sense; Cesaro's narrowed gaze as he asked again, “And you don't remember what you were doing – where you were? who was in their party? – when they abducted you?”

“Nope.” Seth shook his head, scrubbed a hand through Dean's unruly hair. “You say I been gone three days? Believe ya, 'cause it feels like I could eat a fuckin' horse, but I don't know, man.” He paused to tap at his temple. “'S'all a blank until I woke up and started bashin' heads a couple hours ago.”

The door of the safehouse flew open so hard and fast that it banged off of the wall behind and swung half-way shut again.

“He's already told you he doesn't remember,” Roman thundered, stalking into the room.  “Considering it was your little project that got him pinched, maybe you want to review your own intelligence and come at him with the debriefing tomorrow.”

It wasn't a question and, for all that he was on the wrong side these days, Cesaro wasn't a fool.

“You're right,” he said, chastened. “Forgive me, my friend.” He offered Dean a hand that Seth looked at dubiously for a moment before taking, allowing himself to be pulled into a brief embrace off the powerful handshake. “I should have said straight away how glad I am to find you unscathed.”

“No sweat,” Seth said, voice rough, and pounded one fist, erratic but not-too-hard, against Cesaro's back as he leaned in to the hug. It was easier than he'd expected, simulating Dean's awkward discomfort on the receiving end of affection.

Cesaro and Roman traded tense nods as Cesaro gathered his things and passed through the door that Roman held for him with an exaggerated politeness that Seth recognized as barely-contained fury. Roman shut the door firmly behind him, throwing the line of deadbolts one by one and breathing out a slow, heavy sigh.

Roman spun from the door and crossed the room with the quickness that had always taken the Shield's enemies by surprise, sweeping Seth into his arms almost before he'd registered that they were alone now in the safehouse.

“Uce, you scared the shit out of me,” he breathed into Dean's hair.

“Wasn't the plan,” Seth said, Dean's voice coming out breathless.

“No, I know.” Roman's hand settled at the back of Dean's head, fingers threading into his hair. “You're okay?”

“Am now,” he said, and leaned into Roman's shoulder. He wasn't sure that Dean wouldn't have started to bristle at so much contact already, but he remembered this too well to make himself pull away: the steadiness and warmth of Roman's frame enveloping him, the sweet scent of his hair – the herbal treatment his gentle fingers had spent more than one lazy morning working into Seth's scalp –; the rumble of his voice, his worries of the last few days tumbling from his lips and rolling from his chest and into Dean's.

The comfort wasn't _for_ him, but Seth soaked it up shamelessly anyway. He still had 44 and a half hours to get the information he was here for.

 

Roman set a plate in front of him: a grilled cheese sandwich cut into four neat triangles.

"Didja think I couldn't handle a big boy sandwich?" Seth snickered. "Gonna cut my crusts off for me, too?"

"Old habits, man." Roman returned to the table with a plate of his own and a couple of bottles of that shitty Mexican beer Dean liked. His foot bumped against Dean's under the table as he settled into the other chair.  This close, Seth could see the dark circles underneath his eyes, the shadowy places on his cheeks and neck where he'd been too preoccupied to trim his beard.  

"How is Jo?" he asked, forgetting himself for a second, losing the thread of his purpose as sat in the kitchen's soft light, eating comforting grease, and talking companionably with Roman, like any of the million other nights they'd thought stretched out in front of them. He winced, and tried to cover it with a quick bite.

“Think she could tell I was worried when I talked to her yesterday.” Roman took a slow pull from his bottle and gave him a rueful smile, hooking his foot behind Dean's ankle under the table. 

If it had been a stupid question, something Dean wouldn't have needed to ask, then Roman was too happy to have Dean back to notice the inconsistency. After everything Seth had tried when they were still a unit, now that he'd taken himself out of the equation, Dean and Roman were making each other happy all on their own. He tossed Dean's customary smirk across the table and tried to swallow his bitterness down with a swig of cheap beer.

 

He stepped into the shower gratefully. The safehouse bathroom wasn't as palatial as the one he'd grown used to at Authority HQ, but it was definitely cleaner than some of the shitholes they'd stayed in back in the day, and the water was hot, sluicing down the planes and angles of Dean's body, going to work on the ever-present stiffness of Dean's bum shoulder and the knots that had taken up residence at the base of his neck, tension winding tight as Seth second-guessed every word and look and touch.

There had been a time - he could admit that to himself now, from the future - when he'd been unbearably curious about Dean's body: his big hands alternately rough and gentle on Seth's skin; broad shoulders marked but unbowed by a life lived hard; the notches of hipbone and hard muscle that emerged tantalizingly above the waist of his ratty jeans. Even when being with Roman had been every good thing in Seth's life, he'd imagined more than a few times what it would be like to touch Dean and make him fall apart, to hear the noise he made when he came and find out whether even a good lay was enough to iron all the tics and twitches out of him for a few minutes. He felt a low flicker of interest spark to life and rubbed Dean's hand idly over the definition of his abs, the layer of hair that hadn't been there the last time Seth had seen his bare chest. Seth had a job to do, a mission with a steadily ticking clock, but he could spare a few minutes here. Call it research. Exorcism.

The door creaked open: Roman hovering, the big dog always on watch. He smiled in spite of himself and ducked under the faucet. Which meant that he didn't hear Roman moving through the room until he was pushing the curtain back and stepping into the stall with him.

“Um. Hi. You lost?” he tried to put a defensive tone in Dean's mouth, even as his gaze wandered, taking in the familiar length of Roman's body: bronze skin and taut muscle and delicate traceries of ink, hair loose and falling in luxuriant waves in the shower's steam.

“With you?” Roman laughed. “Usually.” He reached up and framed Dean's jaw with one hand, his thumb stroking and catching on four or five days' worth of beard. “No place else I'd rather be, though.”

His breath caught in Dean's lungs and Roman surged forward to kiss him, urgent and sloppy, and he kissed back, without remembering to startle the way Dean would have, taking every soft touch like a jolt from a cattle-prod. Four hours in, and Seth had already irrevocably blown his cover. He'd have to count on Roman - Cesaro, Zayn, Natalya, Regal, whoever else - not being willing to kill him while he wore Ambrose's skin.

Except. Roman didn't seem to notice that anything was amiss. He kissed Dean's mouth thoroughly, not breaking until he had to pause for breath, and then tugged him forward into an embrace that pressed them together from shoulder to hip, Roman's hands spreading warm and tender over the skin of Dean's back.

“Turn around,” Roman said, dropping a careless kiss against his temple and taking half a step back to produce a bottle of shampoo from a shower shelf.

Seth froze. The Dean he'd known would never have just gone along with such a straightforward request, but he wanted to do it - wanted Roman's hands in his hair, his admiration in his ear again - so badly it was almost embarrassing. And, the longer this went on, the more he began to suspect that _his_ Dean and everyone else's were not the same guy at all. They'd diverged at some point, and Seth hadn't been around to mark his new path.

“Hey,” Roman said softly, hand sliding up to curve against Dean's cheek in a gesture that Seth used to think was only for him. “I got you tonight. You know I wouldn't fuck you up for the whole world, right?”

What the hell would Dean have said to that? Seth wasn't even sure he knew how to respond as his own self. Roman had never had to assure him that he wouldn't be betrayed; it hadn't even existed on Roman's radar as a possibility the last time they'd been together this way. Instead of answering, Seth complied, turning to face the opposite wall, and feeling Roman's fingers, slick now with rich lather wind into Dean's hair, scratching gently over his scalp, rubbing tight circles into his skin. Seth leaned into the touch and heard a jagged sound emerge from Dean's throat.

"That's my boy," Roman said softly, skimming suds back from Dean's forehead, dipping to brush a light kiss onto his shoulder.

By the time Roman was tipping Dean's head back in the spray, smoothing his fingers through the damp curls to make sure it rinsed clean, Seth was already half-hard. He didn't know whether that was mostly Dean's body, responding to his partner's touch regardless of who was actually present behind its blue eyes, or mainly himself, remembering Roman's hands cataloging his form like something rare and precious. Either way, he knew it must be the right response - the one that wouldn't give him away - when Roman pressed against him from behind, his mouth landing on a sensitive spot below Dean's ear, Roman's own hardness nudging against his thigh.

“You doing okay?” Roman asked, lips brushing against Dean's skin as one arm wrapped itself around Dean's middle, hand curling against his opposite hip. “You're quiet.”

“Little more shook up than I thought, I guess.” He shrugged restlessly, and Roman's mouth drifted down to trail a line of kisses down the ridge of muscle where Dean's neck met his shoulder.

“Did –” Roman paused again, his arm squeezing more tightly around him, his lips pressing, somehow, even more tenderly to Dean's skin. “Did you have a run-in with Seth? I know that's still hard to bounce back from.”

He swallowed the lump that suddenly formed in Dean's throat. “Maybe? Still kinda fuzzy on the details.” He shifted one of the hands that was braced against the shower wall down to cover Roman's at Dean's hip. “What was I digging into? Maybe that'll jog my memory?”

Roman shook his head, his beard scraping against the back of Dean's neck in a way that made Seth shiver. “Tomorrow,” he said. “They'll bring in Sandow or a couple of the other shrinks to poke around in your head. All that can wait 'til then.”

"Can it, though? The Authority's on the edge of something major, right? They say it's been three days. That's a lot of time gone. What did you guys work out while I was AWOL?”

Roman leaned forward, the long line of his body pressing taut and wet and warm along Dean's back, and turned off the tap. When he stepped back, he unwound his grip in a half-powered cheesy dance twirl that left Seth pinned under his gaze, heavy and hot and open. The last time Roman had turned that look on him, Seth had spat venom and hit him with another chair.

He had no clue how Dean would have held up under that expression, but figured that this was one of the few times that 'attack with foreign object' was off the menu.  Still, he bowed Dean's head, eyes landing on Roman's chestpiece, and felt what seemed to be Dean's heart climbing into his throat.

“Don't know about anybody else,” Roman said, tipping Dean's chin back up with gentle fingers, “but I worked out that I don't want to do any of this without you.” He leaned forward to press another kiss to Dean's temple and spoke into his ear. “The company'll pick you apart tomorrow. Let me have tonight.”

Seth took a shaky breath and ran the numbers. Forty-three hours, give or take. Thirty-six or thirty-seven by the time they rolled in to the temporary base tomorrow. Time enough to find some sucker that he used to know to fill in the blanks for a poor, confused, unstable colleague.

Even if Seth hadn't wanted to take the time or the touch or whatever else Roman was putting on the table, there was no way that impulsive, proudly degenerate Dean Ambrose would pass it up, especially for something as responsible as going in to be evaluated and debriefed. Seth had always been a pro at undercover.

“Just got clean,” he grumbled, “and you want to dirty me up again.” He kissed the corner of Roman's mouth, letting Dean's lips curl into a feral grin. “I like it.”

 

However much Seth might have wondered about Dean's body before tonight, it was clear that, in the time since Seth had sloughed them both off, Roman had learned every inch of him: the old scars hashed onto the skin of his back; the ticklish places below his lowest set of ribs and at the crease of his knee; the spot just inside the groove of his hip that made Seth arch up from the mattress and into the touch of Roman's mouth; the sequence of little touches that wrung helpless noises up out of Dean's chest; all the ways they fit together to let Roman in close enough to swallow each raw sound as it passed his lips.

He'd known Seth's body that well, once. Maybe he still did; after all, Seth hadn't been able to forget the secrets of Roman's skin or the heat that flared in his eyes when he wound a fist into his hair and gave a sharp tug. That had been a sacrifice he'd made willingly enough, when it became clear that Roman and Dean weren't going to see the light. He'd accepted that the next time Roman laid hands on him, it wouldn't be with the reverence he used to know.

That didn't stop him from drinking in the second-hand awe Roman poured out on him now, whispering Dean's name into his skin like a prayer or a promise. It took him a little by surprise when he came, a sudden bolt of heat, vision going to sparks at the edges, a broken sound closer to a sob than anything like pleasure.

 

"Can I ask you for something?" Roman asked. Seth remembered that, too; Roman chattier in the afterglow than any other part of his day.

"Whatever it is, 's already yours," Seth slurred into his pillow, sure that this, at least, was an accurate simulation of Dean on little sleep.

Roman chuckled and grazed a hand down the column of Dean's spine. "I'll remember that", he said. "And you should, too. I just want you to watch out for yourself better."

He made a noncommittal sound, another solidly Dean-before-coffee expression.

"I'm serious. Company's made lots of in-roads and back doors on the Authority, but we only got one Dean Ambrose." In the darkness, Roman's fingertips traced the jagged arc of a scar across Dean's shoulder blade. "You are irreplaceable."

The way Seth laughed at that - too startled and lost to think about his cover - was more than a little hysterical, so he wasn't surprised by the uncertainty in Roman's touch or even the tears that leaked from the corners of Dean's eyes.


End file.
